The Media Whitewashes Biden’s Afghanistan Blunders
The media scrutiny to which he has been briefly subjected is already ebbing.
by David Catron
August 29, 2021, 11:42 PM
When the Biden administration’s feckless management of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan produced all too predictable chaos, the legacy media uncharacteristically reported on the debacle with remarkable candor. This was unsettling to a White House inured to obsequious coverage, and various administration officials have expressed frustration concerning the Fourth Estate’s unfavorable approach to the story. Inevitably, certain “journalists” echoed the complaint. New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz, for example, querulously insisted, “America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has yet to cost our nation a single casualty.” The day after this was published, 13 Americans were murdered by Islamic State terrorists.
In a New York Times column published on the day of this attack, renowned foreign policy expert Ezra Klein wrote, “Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures by pretending to believe in the possibility of a graceful departure.” As usual, Klein’s analysis is hopelessly shallow. A “graceful departure” is what one strives for after a West Village soirée. Withdrawing tens of thousands of military and civilian personnel from Afghanistan isn’t about appearances. A failure to properly plan the execution of such an operation gets people killed. That very failure epitomized this disaster, as the Times itself pointed out:
Interviews with key participants in the last days of the war show a series of misjudgments and the failure of Mr. Biden’s calculation that pulling out American troops — prioritizing their safety before evacuating American citizens and Afghan allies — would result in an orderly withdrawal. Biden administration officials consistently believed they had the luxury of time. Military commanders overestimated the will of the Afghan forces to fight for their own country and underestimated how much the American withdrawal would destroy their confidence.
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https://spectator.org/the-media-whitewashes-bidens-afghanistan-blunders/
